RPG geekery to follow.

Just finished reading You Are In The Tarrasque (since removed) over at Daily Encounter, and it has me thinking about how to use the Tarrasque in a game.

Tarrasque wip? speedpaint © Blackmane on DeviantArt

For those unfamiliar: in D&D, the Tarrasque is a massive, dinosaur-like engine of destruction that wanders the world annihilating things. Imagine a feral dragon with a stick up its butt and a hatred for the world. Its purpose is to rampage through cities, destroying them.

The danger here lies in unleashing a Tarrasque on an unsuspecting party. That’s just uninteresting.

Were I to use a Tarrasque in a game, I think it’d be a known threat. Let’s say, an evil sorcerer threatens to unleash a Tarrasque, or there’s a legend that the Tarrasque will be released if certain conditions are met.

So, the story can build up to the release of the Tarrasque.

The danger here lies in the implied assumption that the players can stop the Tarrasque’s release. To counter that, I’d add a twist:

A sorcerer has discovered that, under certain conditions, he can summon a Tarrasque that is under his control. Once the players encounter the sorcerer, he’s in the middle of the ritual. The sorcerer turns on the party. The party kills the sorcerer, or otherwise breaks his concentration and affects the ritual. While the Tarrasque does appear, it is no longer under the sorcerer’s control.

One other interesting idea: if the Tarrasque does rampage across the world, damaging wide swaths of it, one could build a small campaign setting around a D&D world that’s picking up the pieces from a Tarrasque attack. There’d be tremendous amounts of work to be done, securing supply lines and rebuilding, as evil races take this opportunity to loot defenseless towns.

Much could be done.

I’ve been talking with the great folks on the #4eDnD channel at 4eatwill.net about storytelling in RPGs.

(Yes, another role-playing post. It’s been on my mind.)

One chatter was telling us about the plot he was pulling his players through, and we were advocating for more player choice. Everyone agreed. Great.

But it got me thinking:  what if the players don’t want a lot of choice?

There are multiple strains of role-player, obviously, and maybe I’m the only one who tends to see them on a value continuum: there are the brain-dead “roll players” who just want to bash things and pump their characters’ stats (whose stereotypical mindset is “I’m the action hero in a Hollywood blockbuster”), and the refined “role players” who create deep characters and act them out in-game.

But sometimes, people want to come home from a long day at work and fight orcs.

I totally appreciate a game in which the players are pulled along on a specific plot, in which the players’ job is simply to ride along, then fight the baddies they encounter. That sounds fun.

Maybe players want a brainless action story. Maybe they want to enjoy the spectacle of a DM’s plot, and hang on for the ride. Cool!

"Exchanging life experience" by pedrosimoes7 on Flickr

So, @gamefiend opened up an IRC channel: #4eDnD at 4eatwill.net.

Background: I love IRC in my bones. Perhaps my first major online experience (certainly major; not sure if it was first) was my involvement in the Sci-FiChannel’s IRC servers, where I spent most of my time. Literally. Those were my friends back then.

Anyvay. I left, years passed, and @gamefiend started up #4eDnD. I love gamefiend, love the games he ran for me, and jumped into the IRC channel as soon as I could.

I was stunned to find lots of smart people, who were staying and talking in the channel. This is a gang of some of the smartest people in role-playing games today, at least on the amateur/semi-pro side.

There are very few ways to have useful, helpful conversations online. Forums, Twitter, and Facebook just aren’t built for long-formconversations that dive deep into a topic. IRC and Skype are about the only way to do it, and IRC’s usually full of 14-year-olds, warez kiddies, and idlers in some combination.

This place is different. If you’re interested, head over to at-will.omnivangelist.net/at-will-webchat (now defunct) to join the conversation.

donde se acaban los sueños by bachmont on Flickr

Nearly a year ago, I decided to celebrate the release of D&D 4E’s Dark Sun campaign setting by writing and publishing a Dark Sun adventure.

I got the writing part done okay, but not so much the publishing.

I created a conspiracy, a set of characters, and some tough monsters. I got about 80% done, then stopped. I let other things get in the way.

It’s embarrassing. So now it’s time for me to rectify that mistake.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I decided to finish The Dark Festival. I’ve spent 30–6o minutes every day polishing this adventure. And now it’s done and published.

You can learn more on RPGNow, and buy a copy for US $5. But! If you email me directly, and I’ll email you a free copy. Nothing further required.

"Writing on the Pont de l'Alma next to the scene of Princess Diana's death" by UrbanDigger.com on Flickr

Been listening to Merlyn Bragg’s audiobook The Adventures of English, which traces the history of the English language starting from its earliest days in England.

Which sparked some ideas about languages in role-playing games. D&D-style worlds usually have half a dozen languages: a Common or Basic tongue that’s known by 99% of civilized people, a few species-specific languages, and maybe a few religious or otherwise esoteric languages (equivalent to Latin and Ancient Greek in our world).

But Bragg makes it clear that languages must constantly fight for their lives. Every unique language in existence must have at least one reason for existing right now that makes it more valuable than a common language.

After the Norman Invasion, French became the national language of England for centuries. It survived because the English resented French. English was the language of the English people, which survived through spite and adaptability. Instead of being an ornery holdover from the past, it absorbed large amounts of French to become an even stronger language, creating a vocabulary for similar concepts with different shades of meaning.

Applied to role-playing worlds, this has some interesting possibilities.

In some worlds, races are widely separated by physical distance; dwarves still speak Dwarvish and elves Elvish because those races keep to themselves, and rarely need to speak Common. In that case, adventurers encountering dwarven or elven civilizations will be unable to speak with nearly everybody. Imagine your party having to rely on a translator, and wondering just how accurate the translator is.

Also, any writing left behind by dwarves or elves will invariably be written in Dwarvish or Elvish.

But let’s look at tighter-knit civilizations. Why do dwarves speak Dwarvish? What about Dwarvish has allowed it to fight off Common? Are there vocal proponents of Dwarvish, campaigning to keep it alive? Does it have special uses?

Let’s look at D&D 4th edition; every single one of its languages is a racial language (besides Common, the special case):

• Common
• Deep Speech
• Draconic
• Dwarven
• Elven
• Giant
• Goblin
• Primordial
• Supernal
• Abyssal

This assumes a world in which each primary race lives mostly alone amongst its own kind. Every language choice can be defended; giants probably aren’t going to learn a new language. But it’s a rather dull idea.

Imagine a world in which primordials, gods, angels, and devils all speak variations on the same language–they were all created at roughly the same time, anyway–but the devils developed Abyssal as a magical tongue with strange properties. A curse spoken in Abyssal actually works–but its words and grammar are closely guarded by the devils.

Or what if the Primordial language is woven into the world itself, so that speaking sentences in Primordial shifts the world to your whim? Of course, doing so draws the attention of the Primordials themselves.

Where is the language of scholars? An ancient, dead language provides great adventure hooks, especially if its meaning is not entirely understood. Even better if it’s used for prophecies or clues to a treasure.

My, the possibilities.

There are a lot of interesting theories out there about what a “story” means within a role-playing game.

The simple view sees the GM as the controlling narrator, with the players reacting to the GM’s story. In this view, the players are fundamentally passive, struggling to overcome the GM’s challenges. The PCs are trying to survive or otherwise get past the current obstacle.

This is an outdated paradigm, though a lot of games default to it.

The other extreme sees the players as controllers, with the GM providing a world and antagonists for them. Systems like FATE and Amber feature this much more collaborative, player-driven game.

This is great in theory, but rare in practice. It requires skilled players who are committed to an uncommon level of attention.

So we seek the middle ground. I’ll call it the quasi-collaborative system, in which the GM and players collaborate on certain aspects of the game, while others are kept in the GM’s hand.

What should be kept only for the GM? The plot, the antagonists, and encounter design.  Again, players could collaborate on this, but in practice it doesn’t happen, and it’s hard to maintain tension when the players know every detail about their enemies.

Everything else–setting, system, etc.–can be agreed upon by group consensus, though anything left undecided will be the GM’s purview. Doubtless, there are many details that the players simply won’t care about; the GM is free to fill these in.

This still leaves plenty of options open for player collaboration. In a recent game, the players ended one session at the entrance to a necromancer’s lair, after being asked by the captain of the guard to return with proof of the necromancer’s activity.  I asked the players for suggestions of the kind of proof they could bring back. They gave me some ideas, which I incorporated into the lair.  The tension of the lair remained high, since the danger lay in getting to the proof, not the proof’s specific form.

Also, of course, player choice can dramatically change the plot. PCs may knock out an enemy instead of killing it. They can ask questions that you never thought of.

So, the story is driven primarily by the GM, with the players as important accessory drivers. In my experience, it works well.

My previous blog post got me thinking:

What is an adventure’s intended use?

A lot of adventure writers (myself included) design adventures with a “commercial software” approach: the user will install the software and start using it immediately, probably without a manual, and it needs to work well up-front. It should guide the user in its use and require minimal fiddling to be useful.

What if one were to take an “open source software” approach, in which the user is expected to customize the tool and manipulate it dramatically?

Compare something like HandBrake–insert DVD, select drive, select preset format, and click “Go”–to something like ffmpeg–you have to find the combination of command-line options that will convert your video into the appropriate format, but man there’s an option for everything.

Imagine an adventure that’s divided into several major sequences, and where each sequence is described more like a historical record than a blueprint. Stat blocks appear, sure, but the writer is trying to describe the mood and implications of the situation, not the scaffolding. Reading the description of a sequence should leave you a little breathless with the possibilities.

In other words, what if the writer focused on making the adventure vivid instead of detailed? Imagine an adventure that reads less like a technical manual and more like a Conan story. Give me a neat story to run, and I’ll find the monsters and maps.

There’s a great post over at RPG Musings about buying third-party products. I have a similar problem:

I rarely buythird-partyRPG products. In my experience, those products aretoo-specificslices of other peoples’ campaign worlds, which don’t fit into my own.

I’ve only bought generic tools, like Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names, or completelyself-containedadventures that don’t connect with my world, like a jungle temple adventure I bought.

Which begs the question: what would a more useful product look like?

For adventures, I’m reminded of “Die, Vecna, Die!”, an adventure from 2^nd Edition D&D. The reader is presented with major plot points, providing the DM with the overall shape of the adventure and the creatures involved, leaving room for the DM to decide exactly how many enemies should be in a particular encounter and in what configuration.

This lets the writer focus on being awesome. I want an adventure that makes me think “Oh, man, I have got to use that somehow.” So, adventure writer, don’t sweat the small stuff. Yes, I want monster stat blocks, but don’t map out the entire fight for me.

Let me integrate your adventure, not drop it in whole.

Check in on my Google Wave RPG game, The Legacy of the Lines, a D&D 4E game:
[wave id=”googlewave.com! w+Ov21ogmKA”]

"Circle of Fire" by stephenccwu on Flickr

I’ve been thinking lately about the best way to give feedback to players in my role-playing games.

By “feedback,” I mean pointing out particularly effective and particularly ineffective behavior, like creative problem-solving, forgetting to update a marker, effective teamwork, or aggressive interpersonal behavior.

I used to essentially ignore this. I’d occasionally reward a creative solution with a quick “Great thinking!” I essentially ignored bad behavior.

This, of course, is ineffective.

I then picked up a feedback system from Manager Tools, which used a four-part framework:

1. Privately, ask if it’s okay to give some feedback.
2. Describe the behavior you’re addressing.
3. Describe the positive or negative consequences of that behavior.
4. Ask if they can do it differently next time.

This model’s intended for managers talking to their staff.  Role-playing’s a game; GMs take on a very different role than that of a corporate manager.  (Though there are many parallels.)

I’ve modified it to this:

1. Privately, tell the person that I have some quick feedback.  For positive feedback, I usually start with a “Thanks” sentence.
2. Describe the behavior.
3. Describe the positive or negative consequences of the behavior.
4. Reassure that this is just a little note.

It still doesn’t feel quite right. On the one hand, it feels rather apologetic — can a player really not receive feedback unless it’s sandwiched between such deprecating phrases? On the other hand, RPGs are games, after all, and the GM has little power over the players. Sure, the GM can kill a player’s character…and then the player may never come back.

I also struggle to identify opportunities for positive feedback. I suspect that skill will develop over time, but it’s hard to find things to reward when the game’s going along fine.

I suppose smooth sailing, itself, deserves praise. Hmmm.